Sam Altman, Arthur Mensch and more discuss:Which Startups Are Threatened vs Enabled by OpenAI?|E1156

There was a time when there were, like, more than a hundred car companies in the US, I believe, or at least close to that. And if you go, like, look at some of the old media at the time, it was like, "No, there's this better car. No, there's this better one. No, there's this better one." I think that same thing holds true for most new industries. I think it's fine. I mean, I think it's probably good. But I don't think that's where the enduring value will be. I think eventually it will shake out. There will be a small number of providers, just dozen, something like that, doing models at big scale and it'll be extremely complex, extremely expensive. And I hope we all continue to push each other to make the models better, cheaper, faster and commoditize in that sense. And the long-term differentiation will not be, I don't think, the base model. Like, that's just, you know, intelligence is just like some emergent property of matter or something. The long-term differentiation will be the model that's most personalized to you that has your whole life context that plugs into everything else you want to do, that's, like, well integrated into your life. But for now, the curve is just so steep that the right thing for us to focus on is just make that base model better and better.

Arthur at Mistral. I'm so intrigued to hear your thoughts. How do you think about the focus on just model improvement where value accrues, and ultimately of the foundation models commoditizing in themselves?

It's two opposing directions. So the first is that the models are getting better and better. So it means that creating a verticalized application, as long as you have the data for it and a good understanding of the use case you're facing, is going to be easier and easier if you have access to the tools that facilitate it. Uh, so that's the first aspect, which would make me think that the, the application layer is going to grow thinner and thinner. But then there's also the fact that the models are, are getting, uh, cheaper and cheaper because we manage to compress them, because we make a lot of improvement on their efficiency. And so that means that effectively this press the competitive pressure there is on the model layer, means that, uh, the price around the model, the dollar per intelligence unit, let's say, is definitely going to reduce. So there's these two aspects of growing ability, compressed price, which on one side says that the application layer is going to grow thin, and on the other side says that the model part is going to grow thin. So for us, the, the approach that we are taking is that the model part is still going to be big enough and that we need to build this platform on top of that, uh, because that's where we are going to enable all of the vertical applications that will be interesting for humanity.